


Officer Sharp's Big Day

by stevegallacci



Category: Zootopia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-14
Updated: 2017-06-14
Packaged: 2018-11-13 23:47:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,671
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11195997
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stevegallacci/pseuds/stevegallacci
Summary: Every new member of the ZPD has a little fantasy of being the next great hero of Zootopia, after Judy Hopps' dramatic first days years earlier. But be careful as to what you might wish for. Elizabeth Sharp gets her chance, and might live to regret it.





	Officer Sharp's Big Day

Elizabeth Sharp was in the SWAT ready room when it began. To be able to react quickly, the SWAT team offices were towards the back of the First Precinct building, right next to the vehicle bay. As such, it was isolated from a lot of the day to day traffic and minor dramas, though there were a bank of monitors covering the entrance and other critical areas of the building, just in case. 

There was a warning bleat, a possible approaching threat to the building, and one of the displays changed to a camera looking out across the front of the building and into the plaza beyond. These screens were duplicates of the even more extensive surveillance that the command center had to keep an eye on things. A brief flash of movement, a small object running across the ground. A tiny vehicle, small enough to be a toy, or mouse-size compact car of some kind, perhaps, heading right to the front entrance.

It struck the doors and exploded, knocking the doors askew; the transparencies were armor glass that only cracked, so there was no great shower of debris, but a lot of smoke inside and out. 

"What the ?" Sharp and her fellow officers said in unison. 

Captain Smith was particularly puzzled. "That was almost too weird. We'd always worried about some kind of vehicle attack, but a class A size thing with a firecracker?" He thought a moment. "On your toes, beasties, this could be a distraction!" 

The building intercom blared, "There has been an incident at the front entrance. Other than the bomb squad, everyone needs to sit tight and stay out of the way, though keep an eye out for anything else." 

But barely had that been uttered that there was a new alarm, one that took a fraction for anyone to recognize. And with it was the shocking sound of Clauhauser gasping from his own intercom feed, "Gas attack! Gas - !" Which ended with a fumbling thump. 

The Command Center intercom feed sounded, "All personnel, evacuation plan Delta. Do not attempt to enter the main lobby or open any doors directly to the lobby. Positive pressure plan is being activated." That meant that the building air system was now set to over-pressure the various offices to blow any toxics away and hopefully out of the building.

 

For the SWAT team, dealing with poison gas was something they had trained for, so had their full chemical suits on in an instant. These were military style rubberized overalls with a close-fitting hooded mask rather than a dome or visered helmet. As each was ready, a unique identity beacon flashed on each suit to make it clear they were the properly authorized personnel. Many drills included bad guys attempting to infiltrate situations within the anonymity of featureless suits. 

All but Sharp carried full on assault weapons, not knowing what yet might be in store. She had, instead, chemical testers and first aid kits, and she ran to the lobby and the front desk. There she found Clauhauser, collapsed behind his desk, but with his own gas mask on and a spent atropine injector in his paw. 

"Clauhauser is alive!" She called out on her comm. She then popped several test vials and strips to see what kind of chemistry was actually involved. As she waited for reactions, she was joined by one of her team mates, ready to help move the unconscious cheetah, and one of the bomb squad beasts, also suited up, though in a hazardous materials 'spacesuit', holding out a chemical analyzer. 

"Looks like a class C volatile nerve agent." Sharp referred to a card with reactive patches as well as special swabbed test surfaces. 

"Rodger that. Have it on my testers too." Getting confirming reactions from several sources was the only way to be sure. Many poisonous agents were actually mists or powders, miniscule particles of chemicals that floated in the air. This was a gas, a vapor, a liquid that had both been sprayed and evaporated into the atmosphere, more difficult to defend against, as it needed to be chemically contained rather than simply filtered. 

Then getting Clauhauser out of the lobby was the next order of business. A side exit kept him away from more obvious exposure as he was carried out. All the while the SWAT team's comms were busy, letting everyone know there did not yet seem to be any additional threat, and that there was a wide safety perimeter being established outside, especially down wind. 

Then, just as their collective pulse was beginning to settle, a potential new crisis.

"Traffic monitors just had a tanker truck driving into the middle of Central Plaza. Be ready for anything!"

Sharp needed to concentrate. While two of her teammates warily watched the lobby area with their weapons ready, she went around the vast space, swabbing surfaces to assess the extent of contamination. There were a pair of bomb squad beasts doing the same thing, the area was huge and they needed to be thorough. Since the poison was a gas, there was little accumulation on surfaces; aerosols would tend to fall out over time, making surfaces dangerous even if the air was more or less clear. She opened up new test cards every few minutes to see how far the toxic cloud had gotten into the building. 

The back of the lobby had the entrances to various offices, and even through her mask, Sharp could hear the wheeze of escaping air through the doors. The positive pressure system was working, keeping the gas out of those spaces. She could see nervous staff trapped in some rooms, and she gestured that things were not too bad, and that it was only a matter of time before they could safely escape. Her tests, and the chemical sniffer carried by the bomb squad showed that there was minimal contamination in the area, but better to be safe for now. 

Throughout all this, things were rather quiet. The team was communicating with hand gestures rather than cluttering up the comm nets with chatter, and their particular channel didn't have a lot to say, letting them do their job rather than distract them with what other teams were up to. Most of SWAT was now outside, and as they were suited up, kept security in likely hot spots while regular officers managed the outer safe spaces. 

Then. "All units. The tanker truck in the middle of Central Plaza claims to be full of the same chemical agent as what was used on the precinct. Safety perimeters, especially down wind, are now void, and there is now a general evacuation order for the entire city center."

Sharp could hardly believe it. SWAT had been trained to deal with some level of chemical terrorism, and she knew how awful such weapons could be, but this scale of attack was unthinkable. But she had her immediate job to do and she kept her focus. 

As such, she noticed that detectable contamination had fallen off to near zero now that they were well towards the back of the lobby space, furthest from the entrance. "You seeing this?" She asked the closest bomb squad beast, a Bobcat named Robbi. 

"Yeah, back here, it looks like we're the primary source of detectables. Not even any on the floor." Having been in the area of heavier concentrations, little eddies of gas still swirled around them.

After consulting with the NBC (nuclear/biological/chemical) specialist, it was decided that the remaining office space was safe enough to evacuate. Fortunately, many of the offices were interconnected, so the bulk of the floor was able to leave. 

Sharp was relieved that so many were able to get out, but there were still a few up forward who would have to wait for more airing and possibly decontamination teams to clear the way. 

"Can't they get out through the back windows?" Robbi asked. 

Someone else answered back, "Nope. There was an eddy in the wind around the building. That corner is hot, caught a few folks who went the wrong way 'round." 

Then Captain Smith was on the comm. "Sharp, Tanner, Jackson, and a couple of the bomb squad guys, meet me at the far north exit." 

Sharp looked to Robbi, who checked in with his commander, then shrugged and signaled that he was to go with her. 

Shortly they were all there. Given the all clear, everyone had their masks or helmets off. Captain Smith had a laptop open and on to a map of the plaza. "The tanker is sitting directly over the main drain intersection, likely on purpose." The Badger angrily pulled at his muzzle. "A NBC specialist suggested that even if they don't blow the tank up, they do have it wrapped with explosives, any major leak would run into the storm drains. And that would be bad." Seeing the puzzled looks, he explained. "The drains are not water tight, intending to let water seep in from saturated soil in a storm. Ya know, storm drain and all. If the tank has the same thing that hit the building, it will soak into the now dry ground and be a deadly nuisance for octades to come. Clean up would not be impossible, but releases of gas would mean much of the city would be dangerously uninhabitable for the process, which would take years, at least."

"And that's if it just leaks. And there will still be a gas cloud out of it. If they blow the tank, it could cover everything down wind for who knows how many kilometers, across the city and well out into the countryside. We could be talking body counts into the millions."

"So, the bright beasts in an un-named agency have the brilliant idea of nuking the thing before it gets loose." He waved down the expected exclamations. "I know, a cure that seems worse than the problem. But they're talking about a really tiny bomb, just enough to incinerate the thing on the spot with minimal collateral damage."

Seeing the gob-smacked reaction of the assembled officers, he pressed on. "We're talking less than a hundred ton yield. It'll punch a nasty hole in the middle of the plaza and break windows all over, but they claim minimal fall out." 

"Isn't there going to be a radiation pulse with the detonation?" Jackson asked. He was into military technology and science. 

"Yes. The evacuation order around the plaza for the gas risk will double as a radiation exposure radius. Basically, anyone not line of sight and/or more than a kilometer away won't have any real risk. And even the flash is minimal, no burn and limited blinding hazard."

"So, we wheel the thing up under the truck, just like that?" 

"Pretty much. The whack jobs in the truck all but challenged us to do just that. But more on the level of some kind of commando action or some such. And they could blow the thing at any time. That's why we have to keep this very hush hush, as this is the one thing that might actually work against them."

Everyone looked at each other in a bit of confusion and incredulity, then Jackson asked. "Okay, what are we going to do?" Gesturing at the assembled officers.

"The un-named agency will be bringing the device in shortly and has some agents who will actually set it up. What we need are a couple officers to go in up front and check out the site and assist." Smith looked directly at Sharp. "That would mean you, ideally. Need some climbing and scampering."

She glanced around to the rest, and saw in their faces what she knew herself. This was likely a suicide mission. She nodded. 

Captain Smith looked to the rest. Finally, he asked Robbi, "Do you know how to handle a gun?" 

"Uh? Basically, of course." He was momentarily puzzled, then, "Ah, you might need more climbing, and NBC training." He looked over to Sharp. "Together again. The new heroes of Zootopia."

"Yeah, but you're not my type." Sharp smirked, implying the very famous couple. 

They were driven to a utility access point in the storm drain system in a van that could let them out well within the underground tunnel. The explanation was that they didn't want to risk having too much activity potentially monitored by the bad guys.

They were given a small utility three-wheeler, sort of like the meter maid vehicles, but without a cab and all electric. It had a pair of spools in back, one a fibre-optic ribbon for communications, the other a control cable for the device once it arrived. They were also armed, just in case. 

The two rode in silence up the long tunnel, large enough for full size vehicle traffic. They still had their full chemical gear on, not knowing what they'd find at their destination. Very dark and quiet, but mercifully not that long, little more than a kilometer. 

The junction was maybe five meters square and ten or more high, just a big concrete box of a space, several smaller tunnels branched off the sides and a heavy grating on top and the tank of the tanker rig visible. The two both had their chemical test gear out, Sharp with her cards and swabs and Robbi with his sniffer. 

"The area seems safe, no detectables. Can see the subject tank above us." Sharp reported. Then, breaking procedure, she began peeling off her suit. "We know the gas is an inhalant, so I'm keeping my mask with me, but I'm getting out of my suit. Will make the set up easier." Then to the surprised Bobcat, "I was cooking in that thing anyway and need all the mobility I can get." Pointing up to the grating. 

They set up a splitter box for the fibre-optic communications ribbon and uncoiled connections so that they could move away from the cart's comm set. The bomb cable could wait for the specialists.

There were several sets of ladder rungs set into the walls leading up to some smaller discharge tunnels. 

"Looks like the one to the right will give you best access to the main girders and the middle of the grate." Robbi was, for the moment, still in his full HAZMAT 'space suit' and was technically suppose to stay suited up. "To save yourself some effort, take the line up with you now."

Sharp nodded. She was going to climb up to the grate to see what she could see. Then the plan was that she would hook a pulley to the underside of the grate structure so the device could be hoisted up as close as possible to the tank. She'd been told that the bomb was small enough that the full incineration effect of the fireball was only a few meters. 

Keeping her mask on, she climbed up the rungs to the top, no great effort to that, even with her mask and trailing a light rope and a fibre-opitc ribbon behind her. It was only ten or so meters after all. And there she was. "I'm under the grate, northwest edge. The tractor's engine is idling, and I can clearly see what looks like bundles strapped and duct taped along the full underside of the tank, at least from what I can see." She broke out another set of test cards to see if there was anything to detect. "The testers are not showing anything at all for now." 

She used the light line to pull up the pulley assembly and then crawled upside down off the grate structure to about the mid-point to hook it into place. Then Robbi used the light line to pull the heavier hoisting line up and through the pulley to get everything set for the device. The plan was that the specialists would be there just long enough to connect the bomb to it's control cable and then haul it up to position then they'd all get out and the thing would be set off. 

That was the plan. If the terrorists didn't set off the tank first. If the bomb was anywhere near in place, it could be set off immediately to catch what it could of any release. Regardless of where the team was. 

With everything set up, the pair could only wait. Sharp kept to the top of one of the ladders to keep what little of an eye on what was happening above. She took off her mask, and saw that Robbi was getting his space suit off as well. Free of that, he showed her that he had a simpler gas mask not unlike hers to use as the suit's helmet was part of the whole and could not be effectively worn separately. 

After a rather nervous wait, the longest nearly an hour in their lives, they were informed the specialists and their device was on its way.

And there they were, two larger beasts in full HAZMAT suits in another utility cart. And the bomb. Almost anticlimactic, a simple can of a thing. No fiddly-bits on or around it, just a shiny metal cylinder with a lifting eye-lug on the side. 

"They're here." Sharp reported. "We ought to be out of here in just a couple." 

One of the beasts, some kind of ungulate, Sharp couldn't quite tell, pointed out that they would prefer to not hook up the bomb to its control cable until it was fully in place, just to make sure. Sure. They wrapped the cable around the bomb case and tacked on down with some duct tape. Enough slack at the connector end to easily bring it to the jack in the end of the bomb. 

From her position above, Sharp narrated each step to the command center. Sort of wished she had brought a camera for all this. 

"They have the bomb hooked up and are getting it ready to lift. Looks like its pretty heavy. They're using one of the ladder rungs as a cinch to help them haul it up." 

"Sharp, can you jump to channel two, please." So far the communications to control had been basically one-sided. She and Robbi simply reporting in each step with no real need for comment. But 'jump to channel two' was a code phrase, something was not right. She switched her comm to channel six, and quietly reported. "Sharp here."

"Sharp, I'm handing you off to Special Agent Savage." Captain Smith sounded unhappy. 

"Officer Sharp, how big would you say the device is?" The voice sounded like a smaller mammal, and not a Zootopian accent.

"Simple cylinder, about thirty centimeters around, just over a meter long, maybe. And the way they're pulling on it, must be over 100 or 150 kilos." 

There was a pause. Then, "It is vitally important that it not get set up to detonate." 

Sharp suddenly had a multitude of questions, but she simply waited. 

"Once it gets set in place, can you keep it there. Set it on something or jam the pulley. Anything to keep it out of reach?" She could see that the two specialists didn't look like the kind of beasts that could climb out like she had. The agent must know that too. 

"Sure. I've got zip-ties that I can wrap things with." She figured she could make a knot of them to keep the line from letting it back down. "Then what?" 

"We need to buy some time. There are agents coming your way now, but it will be minutes before they can get there. Would it be possible for you to cut the cable without them seeing it, then plug in the dead connection."

"Easily" Sharp suspected that this whole thing had taken a turn to the weird. Too much to speculate on and no time. The bomb was coming up and she crawled into position to greet it. 

"I want to secure the line at this end to make sure it stays in place." She called down and the specialists nodded in agreement. And she found that she could easily knot up things to keep the thing in place. And from her vantage point, she was able to get her all-purpose tool out and cut the cable without anyone seeing what she was doing below. "Just checking that everything is okay." 

She could see that one of the beasts had his hooves on a control box spliced into the control cable. Heretofore, she would have thought that it was a local detonator control in case they needed to set off the bomb directly in response to the tanker threat. But now she wasn't sure. 

"I'm ready to plug it in." The end of the bomb was simple, an inset end plate with a pair of connector points with screw on caps. The larger one matched the cable end, just plug in and tighten the threaded collar to hold it in place. "And done."

There was an exclamation from below. "What did you do!?" The two specialists were having fits. The one with the box was checking its connections and fiddling with some switches on it. The other appeared to be in heated conversation with someone, inaudible inside his HAZMAT helmet. 

"Check that plug!" 

"Will do." Sharp made a show of undoing the collar and pulling the plug out. "The thing looks good to me. And the alignment key on the plug means I got it in right. Let me try it again." And she did, with exaggerated care. 

"Damnit! Get that back down here!" The specialist raged. 

"That will take a few." And Sharp gestured to her zip-tie knot. And in that moment things went very bad. Before Sharp could even register what was happening, the one specialist had shot Robbi and took a shot at her. It missed her but hit the bomb casing, and she caught some fragments as the bullet splashed off the hard steel body. More in surprise than actual injury, she lost her grip and scrambled to grab on to anything, the line, and began to slide down. Before she could think beyond the panic of almost falling -

An overwhelming flash/impact.

Sharp was alive, but blind and deaf, and choking on smoke. And in pain. Everything hurt like she'd been beaten everywhere. And every movement only hurt worse. And there was something else. She was covered in something, not water, but watery. Ugh. Diesel oil? She couldn't smell anything, her nose was stuffed, was it blood? Could be. She tasted blood, and that awful fuel oil. She struggled to clear her eyes. The oil stung something fierce. There was light now; maybe it was smoke that kept things dark before. She groped for some wipes in her utility kit and got some of her face and around her eyes more or less clear. 

She could then make out a bit of the space. There was smoke clearing out. The grating wasn't overhead anymore. Most of it was down on the floor in a tangled mess. The bomb was somewhat buried in that. Where were the others? And, belatedly, what about the chemical threat? That she was drenched in oil rather than a deadly poison that should have killed in seconds suggested something... 

Where was her headset? She still had her standard police comm on her tactical vest and she activated that. "Officers Sharp and Robbi down and need assistance! Other's status unknown. No poison gas apparent. Seem to have Diesel oil all over down here. Device status uncertain." Did the call go out from down so deep? She repeated her message. As she was still deaf from the presumed explosion, the tanker must have gone off, she had no way of hearing any reply. 

She really wanted to get up and examine the debris, to find out what happened to the two specialists, and, hopefully help Robbi, but simply sitting up against a wall was all she seemed to be able to do. She repeated her message again, not entirely sure if she was even speaking aloud. With all the pain, she couldn't even feel her voice. 

She had to stop calling and clear her mouth, there was a build up of blood. She spat it, ugh, no, just drooled a clotted mess out down the front of her. She must look a fright. All that oil in her fur made her feel particularly icky. She tried to wipe a bit more off her head, and her paw came back bloody. How badly Was she hurt? 

Try to keep calling out. She felt so tired, hurt so bad. Try to concentrate. Try to stay conscious...

Then rescue and a rush to the hospital and all the fuss and bother of doctors and nurses. Between shock and pain meds, it was all a cacophony of action, until it wasn't.

She was in a presumably quiet white room, her hearing wasn't back yet, though a doctor had earlier wrote her a note saying it was only temporary, and in a particularly comfy bed. She felt clean and warm, and still more than a bit muzzy from all the drugs that she'd been pumped with. No worries with all the happy chemistry. She looked to the IV bag she was still hooked up to. Looked like simple saline, though the nurses kept adding secret sauce to the line. 

Part of her wanted to know what happened, but the secret sauce seemed to keep her from focusing on that. Maybe that was just as well. Bobcat boy, what was his name, had got hurt. Didn't he? And the tanker, and the bomb. What happened? Hours passed. 

She was getting bored. She'd slept a while and had gotten a 'nutritious drink' and now the nurses had eased off on the secret sauce and her brains, and something of the pain, was coming back. What she really wanted was some answers to what had just happened back at the storm drain and beyond. But instead she watched the second hand of a wall clock grind around, once, twice, three times, argh, she was so bored. There was a TV in the room, where was the remote control? Then, a guest.

It was Captain Smith. The Wolverine was in his dress blues, the first time she'd ever seen him in anything but tactical gear or fatigues and he didn't look comfortable. He mouthed a possible 'how are you'. 

Sharp attempted to answer, "Still here, I guess." She could feel herself taking, sort of, but still couldn't hear anything. She gestured that she still couldn't hear. 

The Captain nodded and presented a laptop that he opened for her and keyed a prepared message. 

'Your experience in the storm drain will be only that of yourself and officer Robbi. You went in to assess the threat of the terrorist. While doing so, they detonated the tanker truck and you and Officer Robbi were injured in the explosion."

Sharp was not surprised by that and nodded that she understood. Rather than trying to speak, she gestured that she wanted to type in questions. 'How is Robbi?'

Smith answered. 'He'll make it. Single gsw, that Did Not Happen, and minor injuries in the explosion.' 

'Will we ever get the full story?'

'Not likely, and we can't talk about ANYTHING not in the official version. So this will have to be it.' 

'So no hero savior of Zootopia?' 

'Nothing officially. But you'll be getting a special hazardous duty bonus and some extra points on your promotion consideration.'

'Poo!' 

00000

"So. Was this external or internal?"

"The best guess, and by that, I mean after an exhaustive search through all of the players' backgrounds, as well as the preliminary forensic psychological profiles on the apparent ringleaders, looks internal. Nearly the whole of Division Eight seemed to be in on it."

"How can that be? I mean, don't we have better profiling and reliability safeguards than that?"

"Even the best system is only as good as the personnel who implement it. It may have been that several key mammals were already on the inside and jiggled the process, in effect using the personality analysis to recruit like-minded beasts."

"Yeah. And then, as they had already broken into the data system to create falsified documentation, they would have been the first to recognize anyone else's attempts to do an undercover or do an audit."

"Any guesses as to why?"

"Best guess, anti-interspecie-ism. It seems that for every mammal who regards the city as the bright symbol for all mammal kind, there are those who regard it as some kind of perverse and unnatural mingling. Even the notion of non-species-specific civil rights is a sore subject at home and abroad. Remember Belwether and the Killer Bunnies, just to name a few. This time it would not have been merely compromising the ideals of the city, but destroying it outright, and it was a unit of our own system."

"And how did that almost happen?"

"There has been any number of exercises over the years involving unconventional applications of nukes, including situations not unlike what was presented in Zootopia's Central Plaza. Never an actually movement of personnel or devices, just procedural walk-throughs."

"One of the details that came out of some of these exercises is that a request for such and such size device proved to be a procedural problem. The weapon management system was all about controlling individual specific devices and didn't really have an, for lack of a better word, ala Carte style selection process. That is still a bit of a stumbling block for these kind of actions."

"Then, whenever any nuclear device is moved, be it for redeployment, routine maintenance, or whatever, the specific identity of that device is part of its movement order. All the details of the movement is classified, of course, but it is never simply 'a bomb is being moved', but very much bomb number such and such."

"Where that comes into play in this case was that, with the specific device identity, any special request is almost automatically approved, even expedited, as it was an emergency. The presumption was that since the requester already knew what they wanted, then they must obviously have known what they needed."

"So, even as they were telling the officials in Zootopia that they were bringing in a mark 90 atomic demolition device with a yield that would have been selected at about sixty tons, what was actually brought in without question from the ZAF site was a mark 60 200 kiloton thermonuclear weapon." 

"The Division Eight team had caught word that the particular device was being rotated into the active arsenal and was going to be moved again to Jassberg in another week. That's why their set up with the nerve gas and tanker bit was so easily found out after the fact. They may have had an outline of a plot, but needed to do the actual thing on the fly in just a few days." 

"Aren't these things safed? I mean, are they really ready to go off at a moment's notice?" 

"In the bad old days, the actual fission core, the 'physics package', was kept separate until the weapon was on the way to the target for safety sake. A bomber crewmammal actually assembled the bomb en route. But newer devices needed to be more self-contained and at the same time safer. So, for things like the mark 60, it's completely sealed, ready to go, but at the same time, completely inert until given the specific detonation command. That the device in question was never at risk when the tanker exploded, fell to the concrete floor, then was pounded by several tons of falling steel demonstrates that aspect very well." 

"And Division Eight. Were any of the primaries caught?"

"One of the weapons techs survived the explosion on site, but he seems to have been compartmentalized. Very dedicated to the cause, but only knew his specific role. The leader was in the ZPD command center, likely expected to go with everyone else when the bomb was suppose to go off. She was figured out by one of your agents and was darted, but she had previously taken an antagonist drug that made darting lethal, as did several others. When there was no earth-scattering kaboom, they hit themselves with darts to suicide."

"There were a group of them back at their office where they set off a bomb of their own. Just enough to kill them and bust things up for a follow-up incendiary device." 

"And now?"

"Reviews of everything, of course. There were a minimum of personnel who knew of the official plan, and they've reliably sworn to secrecy. The use of an atomic to deal with a real nerve gas attack would have been politically challenging. Against a fake attack, catastrophic. Especially as there would be casualties. Even the actual abbreviated evacuation saw a couple hundred injured and six fatalities. Estimates for the small atomic could have been in the low thousands injured and anyone's guess as to deaths, some score, some hundreds, maybe, and a small but real risk of long term impact from prompt and residual radiation." 

"On the other hand, a real tanker full of nerve gas, effectively dispersed, could have literally killed half of the city, millions of mammals, in less than an hour. The big bomb, had it gone off, would have likely have promptly killed far fewer but would have taken out the heart of the city; the whole urban center would have been gone. And as a surface detonation, would have been extra dirty, leaving much of the rest of the city uninhabitable with all the fall-out."

"And it would reveal that we have thermonuclear weapons just laying around."

"That we have them at all is bad enough, but that we would be seen as using one on ourselves..." 

"All this gives us plenty of work to do."


End file.
